


Inflections and Idiosyncrasies

by Sororising



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Anxiety, F/F, Fluff with tiny bits of angst, Gift Fic, Treat, Unrequited Love, except obviously it isn't let's be real, small bit of internalised biphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9007174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/pseuds/Sororising
Summary: Amy beams at her. She’s just had the most wonderful thought. “¡A veces olvido que las dos podemos hablar español! ¡Es como nuestro idioma secreto!"“Secret language, great,” Rosa says, with an expression on that Amy doubts she could read even if she was sober.Not that she’s not sober right now. Well. She’s not drunk, anyway. Tipsy, maybe. She tips herself over, closer to Rosa, because the idea of tipping a tipsy person makes her want to giggle.“Hey,” Amy says, because this is such a great moment for this, she’s certain of it, and she takes another sip and ends up finishing her glass, because clearly the wine thinks this is the best idea she’s ever had as well. “Hey, Rosa. I want to tell you something. Are you listening?”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stepstostars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stepstostars/gifts).



> Stepstostars, I was your original Yuletide writer, here is an extra gift in apology for the default. Rosa/Amy femslash, there can never be too much of these two in the world <3 I hope you like it! Feel free to let me know if you would like anything tweaked, and happy holidays to you!

Amy Santiago knows the exact moment when she falls just the tiniest bit in love with Rosa Diaz.

It’s not that long after they meet. The squad’s still getting used to each other, still finding their feet. Everyone’s feeling out the ways they can tease some people but not others, the jokes that will get them honest laughter and the ones that might make someone flinch away a little.

Amy isn’t quite sure how she feels about everyone here yet.

Boyle is starting to annoy her with the way he keeps trying to ask Rosa out. She kind of wants to say something, but, well, this is all pretty new still. It’s not like she thinks she’s going to get kicked out of the department for voicing her concerns, or anything, but - is it worth the risk?

Rosa can handle herself, anyway. 

Then one day, when Rosa’s just sitting at her desk, glaring at her paperwork with the exact same expression Amy’s seen her use to cow some of the most vicious drug dealers in the neighbourhood, Boyle tries again.

Amy doesn’t hear exactly what he says, because she’s trying not to pay too much attention - okay, she’s trying not to _look_ like she’s paying too much attention, which isn’t that far from being the same thing. Right?

She definitely hears Rosa’s response, though, because it makes her choke on the sip of water she’d been taking. Thankfully no-one is paying attention to her right now.

“The answer’s no. Would it help if I told you I’m a lesbian?” Rosa says, in that inflectionless voice that Amy really wants to copy but knows she’d never be able to.

The entire office falls silent - well, about as silent as it ever gets; Gina’s dance music is still there as - irritatingly catchy - background noise.

“Um,” Boyle says, clearly lost for words. “Are you?”

Amy holds her breath.

“No,” Rosa says, and Amy tries very hard not to bite off the end of her pen. Stationary should be respected, even when your already-insignificant chances with the woman you kind-of sort-of maybe have a small crush on have just dropped to absolute zero.

“I’m not a lesbian,” Rosa clarifies, which seems redundant at this point. “I’m bisexual,” she says, and _oh._ “I just thought it might get you to back off for five fucking seconds, because my answer is and always will be no.” Her voice has dropped to a dangerous level of calm, and Amy spares the one corner of her brain that isn’t screaming in excitement to hope that Boyle finally gets the message.

He puts his hands up in surrender. Thankfully. “Sorry,” he says, and Amy can’t properly see his expression, but she thinks he does look pretty apologetic. Either that or he’s found a healthy sense of self-preservation from somewhere and is faking an apology, but she doesn’t think so. “Message received. Sorry it took a while.”

 _You should be,_ Amy thinks in his direction, but she knows she doesn’t exactly have a leg to stand on right now. She should have taken Boyle aside and spoken to him earlier, or stuck up for Rosa in front of him, or at least dropped the rules on intra-departmental sexual harassment on his desk.

But she didn’t. She had assumed that Rosa could handle herself. And that had turned out to be true, sure, but that doesn’t mean she’d done the right thing.

She’s going to do better in the future, she tells herself. She’s going to be there to watch Rosa’s back. 

And if that lets her keep a slightly closer eye on Rosa than she does on the rest of her team, well, that’s just an unexpected side bonus. No ulterior motives here at all.

* * *

“Why do you keep looking at me,” Rosa says a few days later, and Amy’s heart immediately decides to go into overdrive.

“You should really put the inflection on the end of your questions,” her brain says with zero input from her. “Otherwise they just sound like statements.”

Rosa just stares at her. Silently. It’s very unnerving, and it’s also kind of attractive. 

_What is wrong with you, Santiago? Pull yourself together._

Pep talks inside her head used to have more effect, she’s sure. Maybe she’s been overusing them lately. 

“I’ll take that on board,” Rosa says, still in a very toneless voice.

* * *

It takes Amy way too long to realise that she and Rosa have actually managed to bypass the whole awkward-colleague-slash-acquaintance stage of their relationship - don’t call it a relationship, she reminds herself - and are now friends.

She’s friends with Rosa.

What on earth.

To be completely fair to her, she had been trying so hard not to get her hopes up that one day Rosa might not-hate her. Now that it seems to have happened - she has no idea what the moment might have been that caused the shift, and it’s not like she can ask: hey, Rosa, quick question, why do you like me? - she isn’t going to second-guess it, though.

Not too much, at least. She has to at least _second_ -guess it, but she’ll try not to go for a third or fourth round of confusion.

* * *

Rosa catches Amy smoking more often than almost the rest of the department put together, and Amy really can’t figure out how.

She’s an excellent detective, okay, but so is Rosa. And Rosa has the advantage of being mildly terrifying, so Amy doesn’t want to start asking everyone else in the 99 questions about her.

“You really should quit,” Rosa says one time, not sounding like she cares at all one way or another. 

She plucks the cigarette from where it’s dangling between Amy’s fingers, takes one slow drag, then hands it back. Amy grips it too tightly when she holds onto it, not wanting to drop it, trying not to think about Rosa’s lips where hers had been only moments before. 

Rosa winks at her, and goes back inside. Amy immediately decides that she must have imagined the wink; as if Rosa Diaz would ever do something like that.

She winces as the cigarette burns down to the filter, drops it quickly and stamps it out.

She really should quit.

But - she wants to know how Rosa keeps catching her, first.

It could just be that Rosa’s sneaking around for her own reasons. She’s probably got lots of secrets herself, much more exciting ones than a half-hearted nicotine addiction.

Or maybe - maybe Rosa watches her, in the same way Amy watches Rosa?

No. It can’t be that.

She puts her hope in a little box, locks it tight, tries not to think about myths and legends.

It definitely can’t be that.

* * *

“Kevin has decided to extend another dinner invitation to the team,” Captain Holt says, and Amy tries very hard to pretend that he isn’t saying it in the exact same tone someone might say _Kevin has made a decision I could not disagree more with._

“We won’t let you down, sir,” she says, very brightly, determined to make those words come true.

She can always claim she’ll do everyone else’s paperwork if nobody at all messes up, not even once. They’d believe her, and there’s no way every single one of them will make it through a formal dinner party without some kind of screw-up, so she would never actually have to follow through.

She’s quite proud of that idea, and decides to hit Jake with it first.

* * *

Amy takes another - very long - sip of her wine. Someone else might use a word like _gulp,_ but _long sip_ sounds so much nicer, really.

This is _such_ a nice party. With such excellent wine. And people. Excellent people.

She’s sitting with Rosa; they’re on a sofa that’s definitely only big enough for two, yet somehow no parts of them are touching. That’s such a shame, she thinks, and quickly takes another drink before she can accidentally do something terrible and humiliating - like say literally anything she’s thinking out loud.

Rosa is laughing at some horrible flailing dance Jake’s doing across the room. It doesn’t _look_ like she’s laughing, of course, but Amy’s got very good at reading her over the months of being painfully in love. 

She takes another drink. This really is excellent wine. She’ll have to remember to compliment Kevin on it again later.

How had she once thought of Rosa as emotionless? Just because someone doesn’t like displaying all their emotions openly doesn’t mean they don’t _have_ them. She has to make it up to her. With a really beautiful, eloquent apology. An apology that will make Rosa forgive her instantly for all the times she’s messed up, all the times she’s forgotten to think of Rosa as a real person, with thoughts and feelings.

“I’m so sorry I thought you were a robot,” Amy says mournfully to her drink. “A really hot robot.”

That might not have been quite as eloquent as she’d wanted it to be. Her mind feels strange right now, sort of - spinny and slow and fast at the same time. Being drunk is so fun. She should definitely do it more often.

“What the actual fuck.”

“Inflections, Rosa,” Amy says in her best attempt at a stern voice, leaning sideways to pat Rosa’s shoulder. “We should get drunken more, don’t you think? Drunken. That’s a really great word. It sounds like it should be grammitically - grammacital - it sounds wrong, but actually it’s perfectly acceptable to use in a sentence.”

“Madre de Dios, you’re chatty when you drink,” Rosa mutters, pushing Amy’s arm until she’s sitting up straight again.

Amy beams at her. She’s just had the most wonderful thought. “¡A veces olvido que las dos podemos hablar español! ¡Es como nuestro idioma secreto!" 

“Secret language, great,” Rosa says, with an expression on that Amy doubts she could read even if she was sober.

Not that she’s not sober right now. Well. She’s not _drunk,_ anyway. Tipsy, maybe. She tips herself over, closer to Rosa, because the idea of tipping a tipsy person makes her want to giggle.

“Hey,” Amy says, because this is _such_ a great moment for this, she’s certain of it, and she takes another sip and ends up finishing her glass, because clearly the wine thinks this is the best idea she’s ever had as well. “Hey, Rosa. I want to tell you something. Are you listening?”

Rosa has to be listening, she decides, because this is going to turn out to be extremely significant for the both of them. They’ll look back on this one day, Amy’s certain, and they’ll both be glad she was so brave.

* * *

Amy wakes up with a small boulder sitting on her head. She reaches up, very clumsily - why aren’t her arms working properly? - and tries to push it off, but meets nothing but empty air.

Oh. Just a headache then.

There isn’t really anything _just_ about the way she feels right now. 

Sort of - mildly nauseated, and like her whole body is trying to creep down into her mattress, rooting itself there so that she never has to leave the very messy blanket pile she’d crawled into however long ago.

And she has a sinking feeling in her stomach that won’t stop growing. Kind of like the feeling she gets when she’s done something wrong and is trying not to think about it, except in this case it’s more she _can’t_ think about it, because she has pretty much no memory of last night.

That is really, really not a good sign.

She curls up in bed, telling herself it’s just for a few more minutes, knowing she’s lying to herself. She’s still got time to get ready, time to make herself look like she isn’t in large amounts of pain.

Time to figure out what the hell happened last night, maybe.

* * *

“What happened last night?” she asks Rosa, very quietly, when she makes it into work - after a very long shower and gulping down a pint of water, neither of which actually helped much.

Rosa doesn’t answer for a second. 

“You came out to me,” she says eventually, inflectionless again, and Amy tries to remember that theory she’d had about Rosa’s lack of question marks hiding some kind of hidden insecurity. It had been a very half-hearted theory even when she didn’t have a pounding headache, so she doesn’t get very far.

Then the actual words catch up with her, and grammar and social norms - for once - have never been further from her mind.

Oh.

That - that could be worse. Probably. At least Rosa hadn’t led with _you confessed your undying love to me,_ or anything like that.

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” Rosa asks, and if Amy didn’t know better she’d say Rosa sounds - hurt.

Amy winces. She does know better, she reminds herself.

Amy tries to meet Rosa’s gaze and finds she can’t quite manage it. “I don’t know,” she says weakly, even though she knows all too well. “I - I felt like I was copying you, I guess.”

Rosa raises her eyebrows, clearly wanting more of an explanation than that. Normally that would make Amy feel - small, somehow, like she was being scrutinised. But right now Rosa mostly just looks confused.

Which is fair enough, really, because Amy has been more than a little confusing lately, she'll freely admit that.

“You know,” Amy says, even though Rosa very obviously doesn’t. “We’re both Latina, which is still pretty rare in the NYPD. I thought, um. Us both being bisexual was kind of a weird coincidence?”

“I - what? That makes no sense,” Rosa says, blunt as always. 

Amy sighs. “I didn’t say it made sense,” she points out. She’s never claimed that any of her anxieties and phobias are _rational,_ okay; she’s a very self-aware person.

Rosa exhales, very loudly. Amy hadn’t known just how much irritation could be put into the sound of someone breathing, and she suddenly feels very small.

“You told me something else,” Rosa says, not making eye contact, and Amy -

Amy remembers.

 _I wish I wasn’t in love with you,_ she’d said, leaning all her weight on Rosa instead of the couch, her wine glass wavering in her hand. _It always makes me sad._

Fuck.

Well, that’s that. She’s startled to find that - underneath all the panic, of course - she’s feeling a bit of relief. She’d built it up in her head for so long; having it out in the open seems almost anti-climatic.

“Well,” she says, summoning up all her courage. “I stand by that. Except the always being sad part. That was just drunk Amy. Sober Amy is usually pretty happy.” _And still very much in love with you,_ she adds inside her head, wondering if Rosa will read the unspoken words in her expression.

She holds her breath. There’s so many ways this could go, so many possibilities, and right now it seems like it would be the worst kind of exhausting to begin to try and work them out. So she doesn’t. She just waits, because she’s played her hand - very unexpectedly and very drunkenly, sure, but she’s played it - and now all she can do is see how Rosa responds.

“Are you telling me that we could have been doing this months ago,” Rosa says in frustration, and a small part of Amy’s brain wants to point out that Rosa’s doing the whole lack of inflection thing again, but it’s a very small part, and she tells it to shut up right now because Rosa’s leaning forward, and so is Amy, his heart racing and her mind spinning, except not in a drunk way this time, and -

And for just one moment, as their lips meet, her mind goes blissfully silent.

It’s a quick kiss, barely a couple of seconds. Amy draws back first, because it’s not she’d been expecting her brain to stay offline for long, and she feels like she has about a thousand questions trying to make themselves known. 

Except she can’t actually articulate any of them, she finds, not when Rosa’s watching her with that - that look in her eyes.

“Um,” Amy says, very ineloquently.

“What,” Rosa says, and the corner of her mouth is twitching in a way that makes Amy wonder if she’s being teased right now; probably, she decides, but she couldn’t care less.

No-one’s ever accused Amy of being _smooth,_ but she figures now might be a good time to try it on for size.

“Want to make up for lost time?” she asks, hoping she sounds braver than she’s feeling, and she leans forward again.

Rosa’s eyes are wide, her lips parted slightly, and she ends up meeting Amy more than halfway.

* * *

“Gina’s never going to let me hear the end of this,” Amy says later that evening, when the two of them are lying in her bed after - well. After some very satisfactory mutual orgasms, to put it discreetly.

“I’m asleep,” Rosa says, which is such an obvious lie that Amy doesn’t feel bad at all for ignoring the words.

Amy folds her arms into a pillow and rests her head on them. “She once asked me if I wanted to practice kissing with her.”

“Excuse me?” 

Rosa rolls over, and Amy has to hide her smile in the crook of her elbow when she sees the look on Rosa’s face.

“I didn’t say yes,” she says innocently. “No need to be jealous.”

“I’m not _jealous,”_ Rosa says, in a very jealous-sounding voice, sliding one hand under the covers. “Can Gina do _this?”_

 _It never came up,_ Amy is about to say, but she’s finding it quite hard to be coherent right now.

“I don’t really care who else can do that,” she says sleepily, after another half-an-hour. “You’re stuck with me now, Diaz.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Rosa says, and she leans over and kisses Amy, just for a second.

Amy wonders if she’ll ever stop feeling that little jolt of amazement whenever she’s with Rosa, and then she realises that she’s already thinking in terms of _ever,_ which implies a _forever,_ and that seems like a lot of pressure to be putting on something that’s literally less than a day old, and -

“Stop thinking,” Rosa says, pushing Amy over onto her side and wrapping one arm loosely around her. “Or think quieter. I want to sleep.”

Easier said than done, usually, except somehow Amy finds herself drifting into a hazy kind of half-sleep, already smiling at the knowledge that her awakening tomorrow will be so much nicer than this morning’s had been.

It’s a very, very good thought.

**Author's Note:**

> I hadn't thought of writing in this fandom before even though I adore Brooklyn 99, I loved thinking about these two though and maybe will write more in the future! So thank you for the prompt :)
> 
> Translation of Amy's Spanish (thanks so much RP8 for the correction, very appreciated!): "Sometimes I forgot we can speak Spanish together! Like our secret language!"
> 
> Happy holidays to you, apologies again for the default and I look forward to all the wonderful Yuletide works that will be released in the next couple days, I'm very glad I heard about this exchange I love the idea.


End file.
